In today's episode of "Fun with Wormholes!" we will discuss how most people's family lines are actually Mobius Strips! -- SilverRey
Today in Fun With Wormholes, we explain how it's theoretically possible to be your own descendant. It all begins with one simple graph... An X-Y axis graph where one axis is time and the other is distance. On it, a line is travelling away from zero at a slight incline relative to time.
Here is our hypothetical traveller, moving at close to light speeds through space. If they then enter a one way wormhole, they travel faster than light, over vast distances very rapidly. The travelling line moves very far along relative to the space axis, but backwards relative to time. This is usually why we say that time travel is possible, but functionally useless. You may have gone back to the time of the dinosaurs, but it would take you the rest of that time to get back.
People would think that returning through the wormhole may be advantageous to time travel, but not if you use the same wormhole. A different line traces a path forward in time but backwards in distance, once it enters the wormhole, it crashes into the original traveller. Of course, using a different one-way wormhole only puts you deeper in time and into an unknown portion of space. So. How do we become our own descendants?
It's very simple. The traveller has a generation ship with more than adequate facilities and stock to travel back _the long way around. The original line bypasses the wormhole zone, and travels forward in time but backwards in space. With close to light travel, it is possible - just barely - for a descendant of the original crew to join the very mission that created them.
Not just a family line, but also a mobius strip.
Of course, the realities of all this nonsense to create a paradox in which a traveller is - more or less - their own grandparental is an enormous waste of resources, but it does highlight some of the more interesting wrinkles of wormhole travel.
If, by some strange happenstance, our hypothetical traveller were to know extant wormhole routes in the ancient past that lead them closer to home, their journey back to the point of origin would be far shorter and they could -theoretically- inject themselves into the timeline a great deal earlier. However, there is the Three Day anomaly to consider.
Communications from colonial sites arrive back at their point of origin within three days of the launch down the wormhole entrance. Three days before, or three days after, the messages arrive. These are messages travelling at or near light speed. Therefore, a vessel travelling at close to light cannot possibly reach their point of origin during the time window of the three day anomaly.
Further, even with the use of normal hyperspace, there will be inevitable delays caused by interactions with extant stations, civilisations, and sundry other entities along the way. Since there is no historical record of such, we can safely assume that nobody has tried.
There is the 'ripple effect' of theoretical time travel, but there is also the 'preventative embuggerance' phenomenon. Numerous crashes have been discovered on planetary surfaces, within comets, and asteroids that suggest that all such time travel experiments are doomed to end in unexpected disaster.
From this, we can presume that the Universe definitely does not like a smarty-pants. Your assignment is to research five such wrecks and construct timelines for what they prepared and what they didn't expect. The Archivaas will be too eager to help you.
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / donnasterns]
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